The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. J04n(talk page) 14:05, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hideki Kasai (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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This article is a generic stub, generated by a bot in 2007. It makes no specific claim to notability; it appears that similar stubs were created for every photographer listed in 328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers, all with the format "Name (years) is a renowned Japanese photographer" (compare the nominated article with Gen Ōtsuka, for example). Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography states that the sole criteria for inclusion in the book was to have a single photograph in the museum's permanent collection at the time the book was published. That doesn't seem to meet WP:CREATIVE.

If this nomination passes, I'll put up a group nomination for the 182 other generated stubs that have been untouched since creation.

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Photography-related deletion discussions. Cckerberos (talk) 23:01, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per Nom. Maybe Quadell's Polbot, which created the articles in the first place, can be used to take out the other non-notable one-liner articles. That bot is presently inactive (thank goodness) and yet can apparently still be used for teejus tasks. – PAINE ELLSWORTH ^CLIMAX! 23:19, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

PS. Wonder how many others like this has that bot created?

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Japan-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:31, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 02:31, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete, without in any way suggesting that there'd be anything wrong in an attempt by a thinking human to write a decent article about Hideki Kasai (葛西秀樹 (although first looks suggest that Kasai is indeed one of the obscurer people in this list). ¶ Shortly after the generation of these hundreds of non-articles, I commented (and I think partly explained), here. I'll add a bit to that. For those who don't have a copy of the book 『日本写真家辞典』 (which despite being in Japanese only, also has an English title, 328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers), I'll comment a bit on that. It's a little encyclopedia of Japanese photographers, published in 2000 and edited (though not published) by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Except for a tiny number of clearly marked exceptions, every person included had at least one photo in the museum's permanent collection. However, there's no indication of what the holding is -- one photo, two hundred? Half or more of the photographers should be more or less familiar names to anyone seriously interested in Japanese photography. Most of the rest should produce the reaction, "Oh, uh, yes." But a few do seem very obscure. It's easy to come up with the names of noteworthy photographers whose omission from the book seems odd: Akira Toriyama, Seiji Kurata, Sakae Tamura, Sakae Tamura. And anyone can come up with Japanese photographers whose omission isn't so very odd but who seem at least as noteworthy as some of the obscurer people in the book. Still, the book remains useful and indeed unchallenged. ¶ Cckerberos writes: If this nomination passes, I'll put up a group nomination for the 182 other generated stubs that have been untouched since creation. I believe that they've all been touched. I touched most, perhaps all, myself. So let's slightly rephrase that: the [however many] other generated stubs that haven't been significally developed since creation. This would involve the deletion of a hundred or more substubs -- "stubs" is too generous -- on people who definitely merit articles. (Gen Ōtsuka [大束元], mentioned above, is definitely one of these. There's not much about him in English, and when his name does appear it's sometimes written as "Otsuka" or "Ohtsuka". But here's a terse example.) So would it be a pity if substubs on people like Ōtsuka were deleted? I don't think so. In their current state, they're useless; and anyone wanting to write a decent article could do so from scratch. ¶ Gene93k Paine Ellsworth asks Wonder how many others like this has that bot created? List of Wikipedians by article count says that it has created 40,046 articles. Though I've no reason to think that any article mass-produced by a bot could be worthwhile, I'll concede that it could have been lucky 46 times. So: forty thousand crap non-articles? -- Hoary (talk) 13:53, 3 March 2013 (UTC) ..... Error fixed 01:00, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Gene93k asks Wonder how many others like this has that bot created? 'Twern't Gene, 'twere me who asked that in a postscript, and Thank you for the 40k+ figure, Hoary! This would involve the deletion of a hundred or more substubs -- "stubs" is too generous -- on people who definitely merit articles. Is that really what you meant to say? or the opposite? I am so confused!>) (You were being sarcastic, weren't you. Weren't you?)>( – PAINE ELLSWORTH ^CLIMAX! 21:22, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the mistaken attribution, now fixed. ¶ I don't know where the confusion comes from. CCkerberos writes of 182 other generated stubs that have been untouched since creation. I know what he/she is referring to. These hardly merit the description "stubs"; I call them "substubs". They have been touched since creation (e.g. by me), but they haven't been significantly developed. I'm not going to count them, but I find the number 182 quite credible. However many there are of them, I'm sure that at least two thirds of them are about people who indisputably merit articles here. (As I've said, Gen Ōtsuka is one of these.) If there are indeed 182 substubs, then there will be over a hundred for people who indisputably merit articles. I'm happy to see these substubs deleted. Of course I'd be a lot happier if a hundred or more real articles were to spring up, but deletion of uninformative substubs should do nothing to inhibit later creation of articles actually worth reading about the same people. ¶ Here's a bonus for you. I don't worry so much about WP:CREATIVE. (After all, it's not a policy.) If somebody doesn't make the grade but nevertheless a short, informative, well-sourced, non-promotional article about her can be provided, I'm happy to see its inclusion. Once, a long time ago, and with this in mind, I decided that as a little challenge I'd find the person who seemed the least significant among the 328, and turn the substub about him or her into a decent little article. I did just that. Nobody objected, then or later. -- Hoary (talk) 01:00, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, to be fair, as Hoary mentions, the nominated article and others mentioned weren't literally untouched. All of them have had their name orders switched (by Hoary, I believe) to match the MoS, and a few have had orphan tags and the like added to them. I perhaps should have said something along the lines of "the 182 other generated stubs haven't had a sentence added to their article text since creation."
• The flip side of that, of course, is that 145 of the stubs generated by the bot have been improved to at least some extent (many by Hoary). For example, the article on Ken Domon started as one of these "substubs".
• I generally take a very inclusionist approach to Wikipedia, so I agree and wouldn't have made the nom if there had actually been anything in the articles, nevermind WP:CREATIVE. But this being AfD, I figured a reference to notability guidelines was probably a good idea. Cckerberos (talk) 02:39, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't take issue with any of that. (NB the first impression you might get from the current article on Ken Domon, that it's long and therefore substantial, quickly dissipates when you see how much of it is merely list, list, list. Ditto for many, probably most, of my expansions of these substubs.) I've got two regrets: that nobody turned circa 182 non-articles into articles (well, no surprise there), and that I didn't have the nerve in 2007 to propose what Cckerberos is proposing now. -- Hoary (talk) 03:23, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. It's not just Polbot that's to blame for these non-articles. Consider Marta Hoepffner. The reader is told (on 27 April 2012): (i) Marta Hoepffner (1912 - 2000) was a German artist and photographer. and (ii) This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the Polish Wikipedia. Here's what was then the current version of the Polish article. It has a precisely composed bibliography (probably enough to have generated the article, and more), but no inline references. So translating chunks of it would either lead to an unsourced article or require an unthinking copy of the bibliography. I often see this kind of non-article; they're merely a waste of other people's time, and an annoyance to would-be readers. (If somebody really wanted an article on Hoepffner, nothing's stopping him from writing a message to WikiProject Poland saying "pl:Marta Hoepffner looks interesting; could I persuade anyone here produce an English equivalent?") -- Hoary (talk) 00:08, 6 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. First, as for the nominated article itself, I cannot find sufficient RS in Japanese to warrant an independent article. As for the other articles created by this bot, I am afraid I am cautious on these matters and would hesitate to support a mass deletion. As already noted, some may actually have merit. Just because an article remains a stub and has not been edited since creation does not mean it is on a non-notable subject (that has never been a criterion for deletion). This is especially the case with non-English language subjects like Japan. (I know plenty of barely edited stubs in Wikipedia on Japanese actors who are very famous in Japan.) I am afraid I feel that most of these bot-related articles should be judged on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps a small task force can be created for this? Michitaro (talk) 13:51, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.